What Would an Entirely Free Software World Look Like?

Say if Bill Gates and Steve Jobs didn't invent Apple or Microsoft. Say if Richard Stallman was ahead of his game when it came to free software, and decided to run the GNU Project in, say, 1975 instead of 1983. What would the world be like?

When there is no proprietary software, there is no capitalism any more. If you want to know what would such a free world look like, you can try to remember China during 1949~1976, or Soviet Union during 1922~1953 (when the two countries were still socialist).

That "companies would still exist" only applies to capitalist society. In capitalist society, companies must mistreat their customers in order to maximize their profits. Free software are not as profitable as proprietary, although free software can be commercialized.

But when capitalism is gone, there would be no companies at all. There would be worker-owned factories, but they work for people's (workers') freedom rather than "profit".

I'm confused. At first I thought you were talking about worker mistreatment, but I see you're claiming that companies have to mistreat customers under capitalism. Could you explain what sort of mistreatment you are referring to, and why it is a necessity under capitalism?

I'd also like to ask: in your opinion, what caused socialism to fail in China and the Soviet Union?

Most people they (companies) mistreat are not their real customers though. Take Google or any other social platform, Facebook. The users are not the customers, instead they're products. It's paradoxical, many companies mistreat their paying customers as well. Companies mistreat other businesses, too.

I can think of examples, too. The first two that came to mind for me, actually, were those dealing in the asbestos industry and those dealing in the tobacco industry. Those are businesses that actually kill their customers.

But the claim wasn't that some companies mistreat their customers; it was that "companies must mistreat their customers to maximize their profits", i.e. that all companies are forced by capitalism to mistreat their customers.

I can see through the lines. Some harsh expressions aside, it's true: most businesses mistreat their customers to a certain extent. Planned obsolescence, vendor lock-ins, incompatibility, hard to repair or prolong useful life.

I think this applies to big corporations, who have no loyalties to any given locality. Mom and pop shops are not in this category.

These companies think that they are only responsible to their shareholders.

Can't you just explain some examples? It's a pretty simple claim; it shouldn't take an entire book to explain.

> In China and Soviet Union, the "capitalist roaders" (Deng Xiaoping and Nikita Khrushchev) seized power, so both countries became capitalist (and now imperialist).

Okay, so then, how would you propose preventing that eventuality in the United States? After all, government swings back and forth based on the impulses of the people and propaganda of the upper class. If anything, it seems like a democracy would see socialism failing much sooner than in a totalitarian dictatorship.

China's and Soviet Union's lessons do not apply to United States. To prevent the "capitalist roaders" from seizing power of Unites States, US must first become a socialist country. If you want to help, join Revolutionary Communist Party of USA and study Marxism, Leninism and Maoism.

That's not what I was asking and was not your claim. You said that capitalism makes it so that businesses must mistreat their customers. Can you please explain how the following businesses are required by the circumstances of capitalism to mistreat their customers, and how they do so?

According to you, socialism failed in China and the Soviet Union because of a simple change in leadership (in your words, "capitalist roaders" having "seized power"). Capitalism, on the other hand, has lasted through several changes in leadership over the course of a time period over ten times as long as you estimate socialism to have lasted in China and the Soviet Union.

So given that according to you, all it takes to bring down socialism is a leadership change, why would socialism be immune to this in a country that has a leadership change at least every eight years?

> So given that according to you, all it takes to bring down socialism is a leadership change, why would socialism be immune to this in a country that has a leadership change at least every eight years?

Since you say "every eight years" I assume that by "leadership change" you mean the election of a new president. That's a more modest sort of leadership change, because there are many things that the president does not control. Even with his party in control of congress, Trump has been unable to negotiate many of the things he has wanted congress to do. Other things he has tried to do were declared unconstitional, which is something that neither he nor congress have a say in. A completely new economic system would be even harder for a president to implement. This doesn't mean that socialism or any other economic system would be immune to change, but there are some limits on how quickly and drastically such change could occur.

> Since you say "every eight years" I assume that by "leadership change" you mean the election of a new president.

No, not just a new President. That's only the most noticeable leadership change most of the time. Congress also changes over time; it's just more gradual and typically more slow given a lack of term limits and a population that doesn't pay much attention to it.

> A completely new economic system would be even harder for a president to implement.

I was asking about why socialism would not be overthrown in the U.S. That wouldn't entail a new economic system; it would simply involve removing government-controlled factories, farms, etc to go back to the old system.

Even if a Constitutional amendment somehow enforced socialism, that could be repealed. Prohibition was a Constitutional amendment, and that didn't last long.

See, it seems to me, though I admit I don't know very much about the topic, that a failed system is being touted as superior to a successful system. I'm just trying to work out what is supposed to be done to make it succeed in the long-term.

> See, it seems to me, though I admit I don't know very much about the topic, that a failed system is being touted as superior to a successful system.

I can't speak for nadebula, but I think that they were implying that socialism is morally superior, not necessarily that it has been more successful. I don't get the sense that this is your view, but to put it in the context of your own values, proprietary video games have been far more successful than free ones, yet you have chosen to create free games, so presumably there was something you valued more than history and probability of success in making that decision. I don't want to get into the question of whether or not socialism really is morally superior, but I think that it's where nadebula is coming from. I agree though that

> I'm just trying to work out what is supposed to be done to make it succeed in the long-term.

is a good question.

> I was asking about why socialism would not be overthrown in the U.S. That wouldn't entail a new economic system; it would simply involve removing government-controlled factories, farms, etc to go back to the old system.

To me "overthrown" has the connotation of being violent and/or occurring very quickly, which might be a good description of what happened in China and the Soviet Union (I'm no expert on the topic either) but is probably not how it would happen if the United States became a socialist country (unless socialism were achieved by first overthrowing the US *political* system, but that's not the scenario I'm assuming). It seems now that by "overthrown" you meant "reverted" without the connotation I took from it, but the observation is still relevant:

It's difficult to imagine the United States as a socialist country because we are so far from being one. However, the premise of this question is that we somehow ended up there. Given the nature of our political system, I think that this would have to happen slowly and involve many steps that reinforce and are reinforced by a large cultural shift. Reverting these things would not be so simple. My view here has little to do with socialism itself. I think that any large change within a slow-moving political system will be harder to revert than in a volatile one.

He was talking about a utopia where there would be no Windows or MacOS. It would be a world of GNU and free libre software. For this to happen, the precondition is socialism. That's what he said.

Capitalism, socialism and communism are different evolutionary stages of society, according to Marx.

For a functional society to be successful, there must be a certain degree of socialism in it. Natural monopolies and software, universal healthcare, education, mass transport, defense, research, space exploration -- they all should be non-profit or shared and funded by taxes. Free for all to use.

I don't see how that follows. All of those things you listed are regulations -- misguided regulations that attack users. In any case, abolishing copyright, patents, and the WIPO treaty doesn't seem to me to require or imply socialism.

I don't think the GNU project starting earlier would have stopped proprietary software from showing up. To prevent proprietary software, you would have to have software uncopyrightable, or copyright abolished. Either scenario is extremely unlikely given how heavily entrenched copyright still is even today.

But what would such a world look like? I think the only particular difference would be that commercial software developers would focus on developing solutions for businesses, rather than creating novelties. Video games, in particular, would become far less profitable, so it would mostly be a hobbyist sphere. You certainly wouldn't have several-million-dollar budgets that you see today.